Sleeping Policemen (23 page)

“What're you doin?” Evans demanded from right behind him.

Nick spun, shoving the box into a jacket pocket. He looked up into Evans's heavy face, looming over him like a full moon. Evans lifted the .45, wedging the barrel under Nick's chin. An abrupt vision of death smote Nick, the Gulf rising remorselessly around him. He saw the table at the Smokin Mountain go clattering over, saw Tucker's brains splashing across the back wall, Finney falling backward in an endless plunge, the mountain coming up hard to snap his body. He saw the gun kick in Evans's hand, felt the white-hot bludgeon of the bullet.

He swallowed, and when he spoke he didn't have to fake the fear in his voice. “The plastic,” he whispered. “Just making sure nothing would …” He dredged the word from the dry canal of his esophagus. “… leak.”

From the edge of the trunk, Nick spotted a stray bullet, half-hidden under the hem of Finney's jacket. It took every ounce of his strength to tear his gaze away. Evans watched him, suspicion like stink coming off him. Nick couldn't help it, his eyes flitted back to the trunk—and what he saw, or
thought
he saw, filled him with fear and joy: Finney's hand twitched, then curled around the stray bullet in a loose fist.

Evans grunted and shoved Nick aside. He looked at the body for a long time, then stepped back and closed the trunk.

“Get in,” he said.

Had he seen it
?

That was the question that kept coming back to Nick as they wound down the last twisting grades and into the valley below.

Had he really seen Finney's hand close around that bullet? And if he had, what then? Was it some last fatal reflex, the muscles constricting with the onset of rigor mortis? Or did it mean something else altogether—that Finney was alive?

He didn't know, couldn't say. And still the seconds continued to crash down upon him, finally hammering the obvious truth into his stunned brain: It didn't matter, not right now anyway. Finney—alive or dead—would have to wait.

Nick had no choice.

When Evans pulled up before Finney's townhouse, College Park looked just the same, as if the world had not torn itself asunder in the space of a few hours, plunging Nick into a parallel universe where psycho state troopers stalked the mountain highways and men in bondage masks hacked apart teenage girls. Somewhere someone was buying coffee. People were sitting down to lunch. What had Gutman said?
There are holes in the world, Mr. Laymon. People fall through them
.

And so he had.

He felt as if he alone had stepped through a doorway between realities, over an unseen precipice that had plunged him into madness.

Even the Torkelsons' place remained unchanged. Tire tracks matted Finney's microscopic front yard as they had so many other mornings, ghostly reminders of the drunken visitors who dropped by down the street at all hours of the night. The gap in the shrubbery matched the clump of leaves and branches wedged under the fender of a beat-up Pinto three doors down, its front end jutting over the curb. Probably still passed out inside, whoever it was. He envisioned a Torkelson—the same one who had been pissing in the yard, maybe—wedging himself into the tiny front seat, off in quest of a pony keg or a dime bag of Jamaican Red. A sense of the life he had lost pierced him: a life free of the imperative of time, where nobody lopped off your pinky if you got knee-walking drunk and blew off your morning classes.

Something thick lodged in his throat. Swallowing hard, he glanced down at the Rolex, reading the time—

—
12:44
—

—through his own rusty thumbprint. He licked his finger; without looking, he wiped the watch face clean, hating the feel of the stuff—

—
blood, Finney's blood, the pink froth at his lips
—

—tacky under his finger.

Evans yanked the door open.

Nick stood, grateful for the chill air. Everything ached. His head, his shoulders and arms. His heart.

Evans jerked his chin at the townhouse. “Anybody home?”

“Nobody.” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “They're all dead.”

Evans pushed him, propelling him up the walk. “I'm right behind you,” he said.

The whole time, Nick's mind was working, trying to find an angle. He could dart into the kitchen, seize a knife—

Laughable. Evans would gun him down before he even figured out where Finney kept the knives. Black despair rolled through him. Laughable to think he could escape, laughable to think he could save them, any of them. The dead mocked him. Tucker, Finney—

—
was he, could he be alive?
—

—even Sue, not dead yet, but soon. Soon.

Me, too, he thought. Soon.

He couldn't remember if he had locked the door. A nightmarish dread that he would have to go through Finney's pockets possessed him. Or worse, that Evans would go back to dig up the keys himself, discovering Finney barely alive, his hand clutching that single spilled bullet.

He ransacked his memory frantically, trying to recall those last moments at the townhouse. But they were a blur: the somehow inconsequential weight of Pomeroy cradled between them, the Torkelson pissing into the shrubs three doors down. Then, even as the door knob gave under his hand, he recalled running back inside to retrieve the private eye's Stetson, swinging the door shut unlocked behind him.

Now, it opened silently. Within, darkness retreated. Their shadows nailed themselves to the parquet tile and the carpeted hallway beyond. Nick stepped inside, the trooper at his heels, prodding him forward with the gun.

Evans closed the door. He turned the deadbolt, the tongue whispering thunderously into its groove in the silence of the empty apartment.

Gloom swallowed their shadows. Dim apertures opened in three directions. Kitchen to the right, bathroom to the left, the hallway straight ahead, opening into a space gray with diffused sunlight, the door onto the deck a brilliant square behind the blinds.

It was ice-cold. Another detail from the night before floated back to claim him: the six-shooter detonating in Pomeroy's hand, the blinds swinging as the sliding glass door beyond blew out.

Evans lifted his hand. The gun was a blue shadow in the surrounding dark. “Where's the key, college boy?”

Nick swallowed. “There's no key.”

The gun swung toward him. “What do you mean?”

“There's no key. I have the tape, though. Right here.” He gestured at the bathroom door, half-baked plans forming and dissipating in his mind, substanceless as smoke. Maybe he could knock the tape from the vanity, spinning in the same motion to drive a knee into Evans's balls.

Evans took a step back, leveled the gun at him.

Maybe not.

“Open the door slowly, turn on the light, and step away,” he said.

Swallowing, Nick opened the door.

Darkness welled out of the bathroom, impenetrable.

Steeling himself, he reached inside and snapped on the light. The planet cracked open, plunging him into a strange, new world.

The tape was gone.

Tuesday, 12:47 to 1:51 PM

Nick stared dumbfounded at the empty vanity. He even reached out and ran his fingers across the smooth countertop, as if the tape might be there after all, his trauma-stunned brain playing tricks on his eyes. Memory slotted onto a reel, unspooling inside his head: Finney fumbling the tape onto the vanity and turning to face him, swinging shut the door.

“What the fuck?” he whispered to himself.

And that was when he saw the dead woman.

She had been flung into the bathtub, sweeping the black shower curtain part way off its rings. A kid's sleeping bag half-enshrouded her, and for a moment Nick could not tear his eyes away from it. Scooby Doo and Shaggy stared back at him, their faces twisted into exaggerated expressions of dismay as a luminescent pirate lurched toward them, arms outstretched. In one hand Shaggy clutched an enormous sandwich; with the other, he fended off a terrified Scooby.

Then the rest of the tableau cascaded over him in a gut-wrenching wave: the blood-streaked tub and the dead woman crumpled inside it, a bottle blonde wearing a red, fuck-me dress, her brown eyes vaucously agog, her face upturned beneath the dripping faucet. On her left hand, splayed palm up at the bottom of the tub, a wedding band glinted. Her dress had ridden up over her thighs, exposing a scalloped edge of red panties. One bare leg dangled over the rim of the tub, a red stilleto heel clinging precariously to the narrow foot.

Evans was a step ahead of him.

“Somebody here,” he grunted, even as Nick was still putting the pieces together: the tire tracks, the Pinto jutting crazily over the curb three doors down, the woman. Someone, all right, Nick thought. But who?

Evans spun warily, Nick forgotten. He jabbed the gun toward the hall.

“Who's there?”

“Just me, motherfucker,” someone said from the kitchen, only it sounded more like
jest me, mothahfuckah
to Nick.

Evans turned too late. Flame licked out in the darkened kitchen and Nick heard an oddly muffled
whump
, the sound of someone firing a pistol buried in throw pillows. Evans flung out his arms and staggered into the bathroom, a marionette shorn of guide wires. His pistol clattered to the parquet floor as another shot went off, this one a little louder.

Nick didn't get out of the way in time. Evans careened into him, dead weight. They went over backward into the tub, the shower curtain tearing free of its remaining rings with a sound—

—
pop-pop-pop
—

—that Nick at first took for gunfire. He smacked his head hard against the opposite wall. Light blossomed behind his eyes, and then the dead woman reached up to embrace him. A split second later Evans landed on top of him.

Breath burst out of him. His lungs clutched desperately to drag in air. Darkness edged his vision.

Panicked, he writhed. Evans slid partly off his chest, relieving the pressure. Nick wriggled farther away, dragging in grateful lungfuls of air. He ended up face to face with the dead blonde. Her mouth hung open, revealing lightly blood-stained teeth. The room stank of shit and urine. For a starkly humiliating moment, Nick thought he had pissed himself. Then he realized that Evans was dead, that he had voided his bowels, his kidneys.

“That's far enough,” someone said—

—
thass fah enuff
—

—and again it took Nick a moment to fit the words together.

The shooter stopped in the dark frame of the doorway.

A kid, Nick thought. A fucking kid, holding an abnormally long-barreled pistol in one hand, a drink in the other. He stood maybe five-five and wore the cast-off clothes of a man: a black sweater with the sleeves pushed above his elbows, a pair of paint-stained blue jeans rolled up at the ankles and cinched tight about his waist with a braided leather belt.

Another step brought him full into the light.

“Not handy enough by far with that fuckin poker are you, son?”

Nick gasped like a man gut-punched, recognizing in the same breath the clothes—

—
Finney's, he painted his bedroom in those jeans
—

—and the man who wore them.

Ernie Pomeroy.

He had plastered those long strands of hair back across his bald pate, and taped a clumsy gauze bandage across his shattered nose, but he still looked like hell: eyes bloodshot with weariness, a purple-black bruise blossoming beyond the edges of the bandage. Enflamed red lines stood out on one cheek, like someone had scratched him.

He sipped at his drink.

“I feel like hell, son, but your friend's liquor has gone a fair piece toward restorin me.”

He took another drink, set the glass atop the vanity, and hunkered down. Wincing, he stood, holding Evans's .45 up to the light. “Ain't really a pistol is it? A fuckin hand cannon, what it is.” He tucked it under his belt, waving his own pistol, the barrel enclosed in some kind of wire baffle. “Silencer,” he said. “Make sure we won't have any company right away. Had it in the trunk. Couple a pistols, too. You kids are sorry fuckin killers, all I can say. Next time you decide to kill someone, you might want to make sure he's dead fore you go dumpin him in the drink, friend. Maybe see how deep the water is too. Live and learn I always say.” He extended the pistol toward Nick and squinted down the barrel. “Learn, anyway.”

“No,” Nick said. “Wait.”

“Oh, sure. Me and you, son, we're gonna pow-wow. After that, we'll see.”

Nick started to struggle out of the tub.

Pomeroy waved the pistol. “Slowly, now.”

Nick moved slowly. As he scrambled out of the tub, he stole a glance at the Rolex. 12:53. Just over an hour left.

“Please—”

“Shut up.” Pomeroy tapped his fingers against something tucked under the waistband of his jeans, a sound like a dog's claws tapping on a ceramic tile floor. “I got the tape now, son. I got the tape and I got the gun, and you're gonna do just as I say, understand?”

Nick swallowed, nodding.

Behind him, one of the bodies settled with a sound like air from a slow-leaking tire.

“Goddamn woman went wild on me,” Pomeroy said, lifting a hand to his face. “All I wanted was her car. Didn't want to shoot her. A Pinto. Can you believe it, she died for a damn Pinto.” His eyes had grown unfocused, regretful, his voice slurred from alcohol.

Nick tensed, his hands flexing. He inched forward as another lost second blazed across his brain, like a comet across a black, black sky. Pomeroy must have sensed his thoughts. He lifted the gun, fixing his eyes on Nick.

“You plannin to go around whackin people with pokers, I got some lessons for you on how to be a killer.” Without looking away from Nick, he dug in his back pocket. A moment later his hand emerged with a switch blade. Nick's mind spun back to Evans, the bone-handled knife he had pressed to Sue's neck, to Casey Nicole Barrett's neck before her. But this was a plainer blade with a handle of black plastic. Pomeroy tossed it at Nick's feet and it clattered, spinning, on the parquet floor.